At Last....

For those following along live....

Cav has weight on the nosewheel again!

Got the engine hung at about 6:30 tonight. So much for working on the rest during the break. The bill was staggering.

Actually made progress on the engine today. The cylinders were put on last night, and today we mostly finished installing the rest of the required parts.

Painted the inner cylinder baffles and the induction tubes. Tomorrow we should finish installing everything and put the engine on the lift. Then we have to install the main forward seal. Then it can go on the plane!

Thanksgiving, 2016

Another Thanksgiving in the books. The calendar pages are flying past.

The blog has been in disarray for a while thanks to google. The previous post had the photos all messed up, due to hosting from google fotos. I need to spend some time figuring how to fix them. I got at least one picture working since the Atlas Air 747 was showing up, but there are supposed to be a bunch more pics.

Actually made significant progress on the engine. There was a long delay getting cylinders shipped. Then the mechanic screwed up the first attempt at assembling the case. A Lycoming engine is pretty simple. The main case is just two case halves, the crank, the cam, and three sets of crank bearings. 10 parts. He put them together (without me) and the crank would not turn. One of the bearings had slipped. Then he let it sit like that for a month, stringing me along, disappearing, waiting on the cylinders, and not communicating with me.

Here's the case assembled for the first time. It will need to be split because the crank is frozen.

I was thinking about this, and realized that if the bearings were binding, and the case had been torqued together, something had to have bent. Sure enough, he finally gets around to splitting the case (with a three week delay waiting on a case splitter) and one of the main bearings is screwed up. He has to order a new one, that only took two weeks. Finally the bearing is in, and he is in town so I help him put the case together again. This time it's good. Oh, but the cylinders are in Tulsa. He doesn't tell me this, only another two weeks go by with out me knowing what is going on. Finally the cylinders arrive. His wife has to make a tortuous drive from Tulsa to Austin. I'd have been happy to fly up and retrieve cylinders, and I told him that much earlier.

So finally, yesterday, 8 months after tearing the engine apart, and 4 months after I requested it be reassembled, I have a zero time engine with brand new cylinders. A couple of key parts still missing, but we can now put it on the plane and I can start putting the firewall forward back together. We'll see how long it will take to get the rest of the details in place for an engine start.




We had a pleasant surprise on Saturday, October 29. Brenda had scored a bunch of tickets to the UT game. So off we went, my first college game since I went to UT. We have watched the Cav's play in this and many other stadiums.


And they beat Baylor! That makes it even better!